Ashes To Ashes
by Nyx Raisa
Summary: Daryl watches the barn burn at the end of Season 2, and thinks about the past.


_Burning._

_Everything burns._

He's a hundred yards from the burning barn, two hundred but he can still feel the heat of it pressing against his face, filling his lungs, riffling the hair across his face. The bike hums beneath him, urging him to go, but he stays. He sits, watches, wasting gas as the barn and the potential life they could have had goes up in flames.

_He is eight years old when everything he's ever known turns to embers. All his clothes, his toys, his favorite bear... his mother. His mother, indifferent at best, more preferring her wine and her cigarettes and her television shows to her youngest son. She had been kind once, he remembered that, but that was long ago. An early memory, faded to black and white and the palest lingering blue of his mother's eyes._

_He remembers picking her a bouquet of the wildflowers that grew around their home; dandelions, Queen Anne's lace, a few daisies and a pretty white flower with big petals he could not name. She smiled at him, when he gave them. She put them in a chipped glass vase, her touch lingering on the wide petals of the unknown flower. _

"_Do you know what this one is?" she asks. When he shakes his head, she sits down on the linoleum floor beside him and tells him a sad story about Cherry-Kee Indians taking a long, long walk. She tells him her grandmother told her that story. Young Daryl listens with his eyes wide and she ruffles his sandy hair, telling him that the roses are a sign of hope. A good omen, whatever that means. _

_His father comes roaring in the front door and she quickly sends him outside to play._

He revs the engine but still doesn't move. The farm is overrun; the warm air carries the sound of gunshots and wet, gnashing groans. They will reach him soon and the bike offers little safety from their clawing hands. Still he watches the barn, mesmerized by the shifting orange and yellow light, the sweet smell of woodsmoke, even the silhouettes of the walkers in front of it, moving forward and yet going nowhere.

_At first he is dazzled by the lights of the police cars and the firetrucks and the ambulance; he has never seen so many in one place before, and all the lights are flashing all at once. His friends are stopped up ahead at the police barrier, standing astride their bikes, heads craned either around the policemen or gawking back at him. He skids to a stop behind them, panting hard. _

_It's only then, up against the wooden sawhorse, does he realize why all these vehicles are here. It is his house that they are stopped in front of. But his house is no longer there._

_His father has always told him not to cry, but he is only eight years old and everything is gone. He doesn't want to cry in front of his older friends, but he bursts into noisy tears, attracting the attention of two nearby police officers. _

_They put him in the back of an ambulance with a blanket on his shoulders, although the day is warm, and it is there is father finds him later._

_His mother's grave is empty. His father jokes that they could have saved a fortune on the burial fee and just put some ashes from the site in an urn. They move into a worn-down trailer in the toolies of Atlanta and his brother spends more and more time in juvie. His father spends more and more time drinking, and Daryl is the only one around now to take the force of that anger._

Where will they go now? How can they possibly go back to scratching a living on the road, never staying in one place for more than a night or two, never feeling safe? He should have known better; safety was an illusion in this world now, and a dangerous one at that. They would never be safe again.

He would never be able to keep them safe.

Maybe it would be better if he went off alone. Surely they'd be going back to the highway, where they left... back to the highway, to regroup. He didn't have to go back with them. They would probably just assume he had been taken, eaten, killed, set alight by the burning barn. He could just... drive. He made it alone before; he could do it again. They still had Rick and T-Dog and Glenn and Maggie and Hershel; all clever, all decent shots. They could do a much better job than he could.

These people... they had come to depend on him, to trust him to keep them safe, to protect them. That was a responsibility he wasn't sure he wanted, much less deserved. He couldn't even find _her_, and she was in that goddamned barn under their noses the entire time.

A scream, much closer than the barn and the fire and the walkers, jolts him out of his uncomfortable reverie.

_The more his father drinks, the more his father is apt to use his fists, or his belt, or any other weapon on the flesh of his children. Merle steps in to take his baby brother's beatings as much as he can, but he spends ever-increasing amounts of time in jail, or in bars with his druggie friends, and soon Daryl is alone to fend for himself. _

_He learns to find solace in the acres of wood outside his home. He teaches himself to track, to climb, to hunt birds and squirrels; first with a slingshot that Merle stole from the corner store in town, then with a cheap bow and arrow he bought himself from working odd jobs. _

_The forest becomes his home more than the beaten-down trailer ever was, or ever could be, and more often then not he escapes into the cool, green comfort with the skin on his back or sides or chest burning from his father's blows. He sometimes screams the birds to silence, sometimes punches rough tree bark until his knuckles are bloody-raw and stinging, sometimes just sits and waits until after dark when he is sure his father is passed out drunk._

_Years pass by like dust in the wind, as the old song goes, and one day it is not just his home that is ashes, but the entire world. _

The scream repeats and he kicks the bike into gear, tracking the sound. It's Carol, backed into the corner with nowhere to run, and nearly done up. He hollers at her over the roaring of the engine and the blood pounding in his ears. Here she was, fighting for her goddamned life while he was off wool-gathering and watching the barn burn like some kind of damn pyromaniac.

She clambers behind him, clumsy with fear and exhaustion. He snaps at her, covering his fear with anger, like he always has and he bites his tongue as they ride off together. She's safe behind him, as her arms wrapped around him and her soft weight behind him can attest. This time, at least, he did not fail. He got to her in time. She was safe. He saved her.

Behind him, the barn collapses with a great, splintery crash and sends a golden cloud of embers high into the air.

They travel through smoke and walkers and he turns onto the highway without even thinking about it. He is drawn back into the group. He is afraid; for them, for himself, for Carol. How can they depend on him when everything he touches turns to ash?


End file.
